The carnival is over

September 14 2002

Photo: Paul Miller

Thirty years after gay liberation swept the country, the next generation prefer to live in their own individual way rather than conform to a scene. Robert Reynolds wonders whether gay life needs to be "out there" any more.

Let's begin with Matt tall, handsome Matt, with the wicked glint in his eyes. At 29, Matt has a roughish air which sets him apart from the manicured masculinity of your average Oxford Street habitues. Matt works out regularly at an inner-west gym, lifting impossibly heavy weights that belie his angular build. It's a popular gym with gay men, and as Matt and I chat under the lateral pull-down machine on a humid afternoon, men glide by, discreetly, but not too discreetly, checking each other out.

It is late February, and as we exchange pleasantries I ask Matt if he intends going to the parade and party that mark the end of each Mardi Gras season. "God no," he snorts derisively, "that's way too gay."

"Too gay?" I inquire, as I watch Matt's gaze trail a sleekly muscular man who wears sunglasses inside, even on overcast days.

Matt smiles, aware of the irony, and explains. "Look, it's not that I'm not attracted to men. Obviously I am. It's just that I don't particularly want to define myself as gay. And just because there is some big gay party on, that doesn't mean I'm going to go."

Warming to his subject, the man with sunglasses forgotten, Matt elaborates. ");document.write("

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"You know, 20 years ago gay men had dinner parties where they sat around and called each other Barbara and Margaret. Ten years ago, if you were gay, every Saturday night you would head out to a bar on Oxford Street. And now," Matt shrugged, finally including himself, "now, we just go to clubs where the music is good."

Matt's no historian, and he is probably too young to remember that 20 years ago, gay men wore beards fuller than his. But if Matt's chronology is slightly awry, his detachment from a gay identity and community may well reflect a wider cultural sentiment, particularly among the young. A full 30 years after gay liberation swept into Australia the question needs to be posed: Is the idea and practice of gay life losing its appeal and its constituency? Is "gay", in fact, passe?

The troubles that have beset Mardi Gras show Matt is not alone in his detachment from gay life. While the president of the AIDS Council of NSW might declare that Mardi Gras is "absolutely central to gay and lesbian life in this city, this state and this country", the indifference of men and women like Matt suggests otherwise.

"Indifference" could be putting it too mildly for some. "It's been circling the plughole for ages," Paul, a gay, 34-year-old inner-city cook tells me. "Let it go down." Asked if he'll miss Mardi Gras, he laughs incredulously. "Miss a bunch of old people, running around like school prefects, telling me how to be gay? It's a short French word that means happy. They should look it up."

Similarly, Jules, a 38-year-old lesbian from Melbourne, is finding it hard to muster any grief. "No great loss," she says, sipping on a cocktail in a chic, inner-city bar. "I nearly wore through the soles of my Blundstones trying to find another lesbian at last year's party."

But for every Matt, Paul and Jules there is another gay man and lesbian lamenting the demise of Mardi Gras, and ready to defend passionately the idea of gay. Often they are veterans of political and social struggles, the activists who fought for the acceptance many of us now take for granted. When I attended a recent Mardi Gras community consultation meeting, the participants were generally, although not exclusively, middle-aged. Perhaps this has always been the case in community organisations the young have better things to do than sit on committees and argue the fine points of organisational procedure but it didn't augur well for regeneration.

Engage some of the older activists in a discussion about gay politics and the prevailing sentiment is bewilderment, if not betrayal, at the creeping stultification of gay and lesbian life in Sydney. More often than not an overcommercialisation of gay life is nominated as the culprit, as if late capitalism has sucked the life force out of homosexuality. At the community meeting, a small gaggle of activists huddled around a whiteboard, puzzling over the future of gay life. "Consumers or Citizens?" they posed, when surely most of us are both.

But the defence of gay stretches well beyond anti-capitalism. A generation of gay life has been more about remaking the self than it has about Left politics, certainly at the street level. Despite the attempts to make homosexuality the natural ally of Marxism, socialism, feminism, anti-racism, anti-globalisation, and any combination of the above, for your average homosexual punter the most significant achievement of gay life has been an improvement in self-esteem.

So as gay falters, the loudest cries of disappointment are not from the Left who are, after all, accustomed to disappointment but from those for whom being gay is all. More specifically, it is the men and women who pin their own self-development to the evolution of Mardi Gras, from street protest to international extravaganza, who are most at risk. For them, the collapse of Mardi Gras is potentially cataclysmic. It is not simply an event that is crumbling, but an established, familiar and successful way of life. Or so it is feared.

There is a danger here in overstating a generational divide. Amid calls for emergency measures and re-engaging the community, one middle-aged man at the Mardi Gras meeting added quietly: "And if all that fails, if it's not wanted or needed, let it go."

Nor does the demise of Mardi Gras necessarily equal the end of gay. Move away from Mardi Gras headquarters to the Oxford Street strip and you'll find plenty of young adults, men especially, relishing a gay identity and lifestyle. I have an occasional drink with Liam, a 24-year-old lawyer, freshly moved to Sydney from interstate. Like a kid let loose in a candy store, he fills me in shyly on his weekend adventures nights at gay clubs that conclude the following afternoon, phone numbers swapped, the Canadian couple he went home with from a bar. When I run my "end of gay" thesis by Liam, he looks at me quizzically. Who would want to end his weekly party?

Liam's enchantment with gay Sydney suggests that activists have it half right. The large commercial gay scene in Sydney makes Mardi Gras less integral to the lives of men like Liam, although he admits a sense of sadness at the festival's collapse. The declining ticket sales at the large parties have pointed to this development. Competition is fierce in the world of gay and lesbian partying. Where once there was a couple of major gatherings yearly, the market has now splintered into niche events, each attracting their own particular version of gay from lycra to leather and on to grunge. The original gay parties have spawned a new generation of revellers. The children have left home, perhaps for good.

But the point of good parenting is that children do leave home. They venture out into a wider world to make their own way, hopefully with the resources to do well. You might say that being gay has become a victim of its own success. It began as a street protest, a rallying cry of an oppressed people. But as the years have passed, and gay and lesbian life evolved confidently and remoulded the mainstream, that sense of oppression, and the communality it engendered, has drained away. Were it not for the catastrophe of AIDS, which wrote new chapters of homosexual beleaguerment, this might have happened earlier.

So it is not just the future of Mardi Gras that is in question, it's also the familiar story of being gay. At the launch of this year's festival, the organisation's president outlined the political tasks that remained age of consent laws, the equal recognition of homosexual relationships, IVF discrimination. All legitimate points, but it was hard to feel oppressed on a balmy Sydney evening with the scent of marijuana in the air.

The launch concluded with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, those hardy veterans from the late 1970s, doing battle with an Archbishop Pell-like figure. I yawned with indifference. I'm 37, a Protestant by birth and agnostic by temperament. The pantomime on stage had little resonance with my experience of being gay. Quite frankly, it all seemed a little forced, as if an opponent had to be found to shore up what it meant to be homosexual. "What this thing needs," I muttered to a friend, "is some sassy 28-year-old lesbian who'll send us on our way with a bit of irony".

And if I'm feeling jaded with the old stories of gay, then I suspect there are many younger men and women, like Matt and Paul, who simply find them irrelevant. Perhaps there is some correlation here with the state of Australian feminism. Feminist mothers, now heading for professional retirement, complain of a lack of respect and activism from their apolitical daughters. Young women, trying to manage the life that 1970s feminism mapped out for them careers, children, more equal relationships just want to get on with things as best they can.

Likewise, Paul bristles when he hears his gay elders, real or imagined, lecture him on how to be gay. A young, twentysomething man I spoke to explained that what attracted him to gay community was not a list of grievances, a manifesto of rights, or even a celebration of identity. What appealed was the spirit that you could be who you wanted to be and hang the rest of the world if they didn't come along for the ride. The minute that spirit was channelled into a distinct identity he lost interest. As for Matt, anything set and determined for this young man was way too gay.

Elizabeth, an academic in her late 30s, agrees. Ferociously bright, Elizabeth does not suffer fools, or other lesbians, gladly. "What I can't abide," she informs me crisply, "are these women who swan around saying 'Look at me, I'm special, I'm a lesbian'. Quite frankly, I need a better reason to check them out."

So does she identify as a lesbian? "Well, yes, at times. But I refuse to wear it as a badge of honour.

"To be honest, I think I just like smart women. And if men were a little smarter," Elizabeth adds, appraising me coolly, "I'd think about heterosexuality."

When I press her further, Elizabeth shifts impatiently in her chair. "I have nothing coherent to say about being a lesbian. In some circumstances it is important in most, it simply isn't."

There is paradox here. The greater the capacity to lead an unremarkable gay or lesbian life, and in inner-city Sydney that capacity is considerable, the less individuals may need to define themselves as such. Nor is this trend restricted to a cosmopolitan location. A 31-year-old man, two hours west of Brisbane, posts an ad on a gay Internet personals board. There have to be some real men out here, he insists in frustration:

"I'm looking for a bloke to hang with, a best mate, someone to share life with. I'm gay and proud of it! But I don't live my life around it. I go to the drags, speedway, in a car club, and am building a 4x4, to have fun in and to get away on weekends."

Being gay has become ever more about choice, even when those choices are narrowed by location, wealth and a lack of partners. Increasingly, one choice is to relinquish the lifestyle, perhaps even the identity, while pursuing the sexual preference. "I figure my brother doesn't say, 'Hi I'm X-Y-Z and I'm straight,' writes the Internet single west of Brisbane, "so why should I say, 'Hi I'm X-Y-Z and I'm a poof?"'

This isn't a new question. But it is a style of homosexuality, unapologetic yet unremarked, that is becoming more viable. It is also the culmination of the early politics of gay liberation, which stressed the individual's ability to remake the self and predicted the end of the homosexual and the heterosexual albeit within a socialist utopia. Capitalism, however, has proved cunningly and creatively conducive to the project of remaking the self. And if the original logic of gay was one of reinvention, then how could gay itself remain impervious?

"I'm torn on this one," Bridget muses as we discuss the end of gay life. "In some ways, since Lucy, I've never felt more like a lesbian," Bridget reflects as she suckles her 10-week-old daughter. "I'm constantly having to alert people to my sexuality now that I'm a mother. In the world of infant care, it is just assumed my partner is a man, which Marion certainly isn't."

When the media discovered lipstick lesbians in the early 1990s, Bridget was their pin-up girl. A strikingly attractive woman in her mid-30s, she has always felt ambivalent about a lesbian identity. "Before Lucy, I preferred the label 'pervert', because it described what I did, not who I was, in the eyes of the outside world at least.

"Mind you, since Lucy, there hasn't been much perversion to speak of," Bridget sighs, as she reaches for a breast pad.

This gap between the external world and the lives individuals create for themselves remains jarring for Bridget, and explains her reluctance to farewell lesbian identity.

"In terms of the people I know and care about, being a lesbian is absolutely irrelevant. It's background stuff. The people I identify with most are other couples with young children, irregardless of sexuality. But when people assume I'm married I'll assert my lesbianism, not because I care what they think, but because I don't want to feel like an actor in my own life."

Paradoxically, this quest for personal authenticity can both support and undercut gay and lesbian life. Call it the postmodern task of creating meaning through a jumble of identities, relationships and circumstance. Increasingly, men and women like Bridget, Elizabeth, Matt and Paul are reluctant to nail their colours to one identity, preferring to move freely among many. Then the outside world reins you in, reminding you that some ways of being are more equal than others.

German sociologist Ulrich Beck has written of "zombie categories", ways of life and identities which are dead yet still alive in contemporary Western society. He nominated the traditional family as one example. Beck didn't have gay or lesbian in mind when he coined the term; indeed gay is often viewed as a fresh, postmodern identity.

Recent events have to make you wonder. No doubt something will emerge from the ashes of Mardi Gras, and the parade could be the better and more anarchic for it. And only an optimist would claim the mundane realities of legislation have kept pace with the cultural avant-garde. As the young discover that public life, policy and funding don't always match individual self-definition, an invigorated politics of sexuality may follow.

But in this age of splintering identity, it will need to be a politics and culture more attuned to the idiosyncratic ambitions of the self. In the meantime, gay and lesbian life as we have known it is looking somewhat tarnished and tired. Not quite dead man walking, but yes, perhaps a touch of the zombie.

Robert Reynolds is a postdoctoral fellow at Sydney University and the author of From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual (Melbourne Uni Press 2002).